Obviously, DOGE Did Not Save Money

By John R. Puri

Thursday, August 06, 2026

 

The Government Accountability Office (which is within the legislative branch, not the executive, thank goodness) has a solid report out today, concluding that DOGE’s supposed hundreds of billions of dollars in federal savings were not what Elon Musk & Co. claimed.

 

The Washington Post summarizes:

 

Though Musk aimed to cut $2 trillion in federal spending, even by DOGE’s own estimates it fell well short. A sporadically updated website tallying its cuts in a “Wall of Receipts” stated that its initiatives had saved $215 billion.

 

The GAO examined $110 billion of this claimed savings that derived from contracts, grants and leases.

 

However, only a fraction of that figure was derived from anything real:

 

DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” “includes leases identified for termination before [the group] was established,” according to the report. In total, 108 of 264 leases DOGE identified on its website “were already in process for termination” when it came into being, the GAO said.

 

In addition, DOGE claimed to have terminated 13,476 contracts, but the GAO analysis showed nearly 2,000 of these contracts “were not terminated.”

 

Of $61 billion in contracts savings DOGE reported, the GAO said more than half the funds — nearly $35 billion — were either not terminated or unable to be corroborated by the investigators, because DOGE’s data was not specific enough to identify it.

 

Roughly $27.4 billion of the savings DOGE claimed from cancellations were from contracts that were not actually terminated, the GAO said. “In these cases, another action, such as reducing the contract value or deobligating some funds could have occurred,” it said.

 

Anyone who followed DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” at the time knew perfectly well that most of the numbers were mistaken, illusory, or simply made up. That is why, under internet scrutiny, DOGE quietly deleted the five largest savings entries from its list, totaling billions of dollars in nonexistent cuts.

 

We could go through each and every falsity — or mention how DOGE didn’t dare scrape the true drivers of federal spending, Social Security and health-care entitlements. But there is an even surer way to prove that DOGE was full of it: cold, hard accounting results.

 

On January 17, 2025 — three days before Trump was inaugurated and Musk got the keys to the Treasury — the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that the federal government would spend $7 trillion in 2025.

 

What did the government actually spend in 2025, the year of all those DOGE cuts? $7 trillion.

 

For 2026, the record is even worse. The CBO projected in its January 2025 report that the government would spend $7.3 trillion this year. Its updated projection as of this January is that we will actually spend $7.45 trillion. Great work, everyone.

 

That DOGE reduced federal spending from its trajectory is a farce, promoted by both the administration’s allies and its opponents. Achieving such an objective was never going to be that easy — or so haphazard.